CONCERNING THE CURRENT WORLDPLOT AND SUCH THINGS

[supraliminally]

Hello Thusia, it is me. Thusia, have you ever thought to yourself, "My character is probably the sort of person who would want to be involved in helping other people and doing useful society things, but I have other plots going on and I am busy IRL and I am more interested in playing other things that appeal to me more as a player and I am too shy to shove my character out into the spotlight of a big plot and etc. etc."

Thusia, if you have thought this, I just want you to know that I think that is totally valid and cool and honestly, sometimes world plot is just not what you want to play out explicitly, and you shouldn't have to spend tons of time playing out things explicitly that don't really interest you.

So purpose number one of this post is this: if you want to handwave your character doing anything whatsoever - giving sacrifices to Eizon or Selyir, offering to help grow some vines for our (future) shiny new generator, doing literally anything else that I haven't thought of yet, doing something completely unrelated to those plans, doing something actively against those plans, seriously I am so cool with anything - anyway, if you want your character to participate or think your character ICly would participate but don't want to spend a ton of time threading it out, please just fill out the short form here. It's very short for real.

And if there are any questions you think are boring or whatever you can just not answer them. It can just say something like, I think my character would really want to help in setting up the portal for people lost in the jungle, but I don't think they would want to help Eizon because he's a huge butthead. Or maybe something like, my character has a little bit of tech savvy, so maybe when the generator is made they can help get it up and running.

Mostly the point of this is so that we can get a gauge on how many characters are actively doing such things? So then ICly we can figure out how fast things are moving, what is going to work and not work, etc. ALSO I would like for this to be a general plotting post about the world things happening. So I have a little survey which you can fill out if you like. I'm really excited about this so far and I think it could be pretty cool, but I just would like to make it so that absolutely anybody who wants to be involved can be, even if they are like, lol whos yukari tho. So yeah.


<b> → Do you know about all of the world plot stuff? (And if not, how can it be made more explicit?)</b><br /><br /> <b>→ How does your character feel about it? Do they care?</b><br /><br /> <b>→ Are they going to do anything about it?</b><br /><br /> → <b>Is there anything that I, other players, or the mods can do to make this more awesome for you?</b>


By the way, do you want to be my friend? I want to be your friend, Thusia, so you can be my friend on plurk at NECROFANTASIA. Here I'll make it a link. NECROFANTASIA. Boom.

Comments

[rabukidastrophes]

We could put up a “here there be dragons” post and invite people to interact with them in whatever way they want! But let me first explain why we didn’t to begin with:

The situation is honestly bad enough that running out and fighting them would be suicidal and we thought it wouldn't really be in the spirit of things to put up a 'interact with nature, but if you are dumb enough to attack 100 dragons you are going to die' post. Yes, the dragons are plot devices, but they are sort of a wall plot device. A wall composed entirely of intelligent poisonous death spikes. There are a lot of things you can do with that wall, but punching it isn't one of the smarter options. A post full of dangerous nature, however, kind of invites punching. A lot of people default to fighting even when it really shouldn't be feasible solution. So... basically that was my concern and why we didn't do that to start with. I didn't want people to feel mislead, that we gave them a post full of aggressive nature and then punished them for attacking it, even though fighting a hundred dragons and their matriarch bird thing that is bigger than the building while depowered on an alien world is just a very bad idea. Thus Eizon info dumping and trying to convey all that without making people go through falling back on "PUNCH ALL THINGS" and then just getting their asses kicked.

So I could put up a post, and try to explain in that post why attacking them would be a terrible idea? But that honestly seemed like something that people wouldn’t enjoy. Perhaps a post of like “THERE ARE SO MANY DRAGONS but maybe you want to go look for food anyway do you think you can gather while avoiding their notice/run back before they eat you?” type of thing would be better?


As for accessibility, it is true Eizon is not the best dude to info dump. But Yukari very quickly put up a post conveying most of the info Eizon had to give and also making herself accessible for talking about it, so I think she did a lot to make it pretty accessible to anyone who might be interested. The whole purpose of the bulletin board is that people can have an excuse to know stuff that they missed. Like, even if Eizon was the BEST PERSON IN THE WORLD to info dump, you are always going to have the accessibility issue of “what if I just wasn’t around for that”. But I think people really just need an IC excuse to know what is going on? Then they can jump in on future stuff whenever they like, and the bulletin covers that. I am hoping that also as more posts go up DOING THINGS that will gather some steam, like “oh you see people doing stuff, go to investigate, hear about what is happening, decide to help”. But if there is something else that might help, I am all ears.


There are definitely many chances for success! Eizon openly encouraged several ideas and didn't discourage and provided info to facilitate several others. Some ideas he pointed out the flaws in, which people then came back with other ways to address those. We’ve done our best, OOCly, to facilitate the ideas that are most workable (and if you or anyone else feels like they need mod attention on THIS IDEA BUT HOW, let us know!)The only idea flat out kicked in the teeth was fighting them head on.

And honestly, we very specifically made the situation so that fighting them head on would obviously be a bad idea. We wanted it to be so clearly a terrible idea that no one would rationally consider it. And obviously that didn’t happen, and in the future I’ll try to be more explicate about that. Lesson learned. But, there are lots of times when you can solve a thing by getting enough shounen characters together and hitting it. I’ve played in those a ton of times, and they are great! But when it is an option it’s what people are going to do, and we wanted to force some exploration of other stuff that can be done (and also, to me, something more interesting than fighting a lot of dragon npcs), which is why there is an overwhelming number of dragons AND they have backup that could, as Eizon said, dismantle the building. The idea he was trying to get across was not ‘Humans suck’ just ‘Trying to fight them is suicidal’.

People have already come up with like three things I never considered and they are all great ideas so I am excited to see where that goes. People have also not even touched on several other options I did consider, and hell, they may very well not even need them! There are a lot of things to do in this scenario but yes, it was designed to not be surmountable with a sufficient number of fighters. I’m very sorry if anyone feels mislead on account of me not properly conveying that. However, the purpose OF Eizon’s post was to make that clear, ICly, so it’s ok if people didn’t realize it before! Once it was made ICly clear, a lot of other possible solutions were immediately being suggested and honestly I think it went really very well.

[best_ended]

First, let me just say that a lot of what I say here are my own experiences, so I'm sorry if people don't feel the same but yes. And a lot of what I have to say are my feelings about how the plot has played out so far, true. BUT, I am looking for solutions to any of the accessibility issues that may be present now, not previously. The event's already well underway so whatever mistakes were made have been made, but there are ways to pick it up from here.

Secondly, I do agree there has been some good ideas coming out from that post! In fact, I was relieved that there was a post at all regarding the issue to explain what was going on so the populace was alerted, because as I said, it didn't seem like there was a lot of public notice going on re: ZOMG DRAGONS!!1 because they weren't an immediately threat. A lot of the details you're mentioning in the above comments are things that didn't really come to light for me, personally, until I read the threads that went on in that post. I didn't know there was a matriarch, and I certainly didn't know that it could demolish the building, nor did I know just how many dragons there were or if there were even more than the ones that were roosting on the 5th Level. None of my characters knew any of this, and I play three--one of them an informant who likes to be in the know. So idk if other people have been facing that issue or not, but that's what I've experienced.

Thirdly: But I think people really just need an IC excuse to know what is going on? <-- this is exactly what I mean about accessibility issues. You can put in flavor text all you want that there's dragons and it's dangerous, but if no one has an IC excuse to interact with this point, they can and will handwave--leaving things open for people to avoid the plot is all well and good, but having something like a "Welp, food is running low, some brave souls better try to get to hunting!" event would help with establishing and confirming that this IS an Immediate Threat and thus needs an Immediate Decision. Much like how a lot of people will be going "??? Bitey god, what?" up until they go, "OMG, DID YOU SEE THAT GIRL BITING THAT DUDE?!" or with the were-dragons, where just recently one of them nommed a dude and people worked to get him revived. These are plot elements--events that can effect the community. They're very open and very much accessible for their visibility and for being able to play with if people choose to.

Fourthly, while it's good that you're able to look back and see what worked and what did not, I'd rather focus on how to rein in the plot now and give the players some time to have fun with it. Yukari making a quick post about it was a brilliant idea, but it's a notice board--not everyone is going to read it. tl;dr, even--think if someone in an apartment complex posted up fliers about things like that, would a lot of people even notice if they're busy in their day-to-day? Again, see point three. Not only that but other people have pointed out that there's a lot going on that they are not aware of. So while Yukari's post can help with explain wtf Eizon was saying, it leaves out all the rest of the current issues and shifts the focus on that plot instead of maintaining the others. I'm sure Yukari will be willing to work with people to keep that from happening more and help with making sure people are aware of all the elements going on, so that's fine.

Finally, I never have issues with a plot that has a WELP THIS MIGHT BAD END or even something with a known outcome. It's not the end-point that's the fun, it's playing to get to the end point. So my mentioning "Don't let it be 100% failure" was less about what happens at the end of the plot but more to do with giving characters and players motivations. A lot of Thusia's early issues were "This is too dark", "This is too depressing", "There's no way to Good End here", etc. And this plot had the same feeling for me before that post with Eizon, so it's still a concern for me now. With Tempest's idea and even Yukari's idea, there's some home for things to end well, but a set ending with a set outcome--say, like, no matter what we do, the place will move anyway--is something that I worry about. Multiple endings and multiple possibilities are ace. Because even if you say "Well, if you had done this, you could have totally gotten everything you wanted, but instead you did this and now we're moving," it's more fulfilling?

I dunno if that helps. LIKE I SAID: I'm not as concerned about the reasons why xyz happened. All I know is that xyz has made the plot hard to interact with up until this point. Acknowledging that and working with people now that there's an opening to do so is what I would be looking for in general.

[rabukidastrophes]

Ok, I think I understand what you mean by accessibility. We do fully intend to have more posts which will hopefully draw more people in. I'll try to keep in mind different ways to go about this. Obviously we don't want to flood people with them, but there will be a generator post tomorrow, and while food scarcity shouldn't be a thing this early, as becomes a more obvious concern (if things aren't resolved before then) we'll definitely try to make sure it gets to people's attentions. It's a process, though, we can't dump all of that down at once. Eizon's post was part of the process (in response to realizing that we hadn't gotten X and Y across). We'll also try to push a little more to give people need to get involved, even if they don't want to deal with Eizon head on.

As far as "Can we win". The answer is simply yes. That's what I meant by saying there was hope for success. That people were considering lots of stuff I never thought of, and that we don't have any set plans. We really do not have any set plans. We had stuff we figured was pretty likely, which is now looking a lot less likely, and that is awesome. What happens is entirely about how people play, what paths they pursue, etc etc. We are literally building this as we go because trying to figure out what people will come up with always proves immediately futile, so I honestly only have slightly more idea of what is going to happen than anyone else.